Sunday, October 27, 2013

Ender's Game, chapter fourteen, part two, in which the plan works perfectly

So there was no Ender post last weekend. That was a thing that didn't happen, because my brain was exhausted from a marathon tabletop RPG session the day before. My first attempt at GMing! It was good times. So, to make it all up to you, I'm going to blitz through the entire remainder of the chapter. This is because we are friends, and not because there are a lot of 'action' sequences in this part of the book that are really easy to skim over. It's time for the final campaign! It is time for the game to ender. End. Warning: incoming game.

Ender gets to the game room and the controls are gone, replaced with a switchboard. He'll be playing as commander from now on, with a team of lieutenants, who speak as soon as he puts on the headphones:

"Salaam," said a whisper in his ears.

"Alai," said Ender.

"And me, the dwarf."

"Bean."

And Petra, and Dink; Crazy Tom, Shen, Hot Soup, Fly Molo, Carn Carby, all the best students Ender had fought with or fought against, everyone that Ender had trusted in Battle School.

And the scarecrow and the tin man and so forth. We're told there are three dozen of them in total, despite Card having run out of recognisable names after nine of them. A couple more names will come up over the course of the chapter, and Ender's Shadow. Vlad. Who was Vlad? I feel like I would have remembered a Vlad. Still, twenty-six more unnamed heroes helping save the world! I'm just going to assume at least one of them is named BustopherKobayashi. If Card didn't want this to happen, he should have said there was only a team of a dozen. Was he afraid Ender wouldn't seem special enough if his elite team was too elite? Also, they made a huge deal about bringing Ender to Eros, but nine months later they ship in thirty-six more kids like it's no big thing? And it's not like they're all the ultimate geniuses--Shen's biggest on-page achievement so far is refusing to let catcalls get to him a few years ago. Is it just narrative convenience that Battle School's greatest students are all Ender's best friends, or are they giving him his friends regardless of their skill level? The latter is sort of plausible, but it will fail utterly in short order.

They start having a great time with the games now that they are reunited, and over the next three weeks of practices Ender gets to know everyone's skillset: Dink is great with orders but terrible at improvisation (despite having had years more command experience than Ender--remember, he was a commander even in Rat when he had his independent toon), Bean gets overwhelmed with large groups but shreds up with a small strike force (that will get retconned to bits in Shadow), and Alai is a master strategist almost equal to Ender (not that we've ever seen or ever will see proof of this, nor will it affect the plot at all; Ender suggests replacing himself with Alai at one point but Mazer shoots it down instantly by telling Ender to "be honest").

Ender and Mazer analyse the latest practice and observe that his team basically moves like a formic fleet now, their coordination is so perfect, but they still have independent thought and innovation. Go humanity. So now it's time for the next course of testing, in which they'll simulate an entire invasion campaign just like the one that's going to really happen when the fleet arrives. Mazer also takes a moment to tell Ender not to complain about how hard it is going to get, because he lost his wife to time-travel, which is a pretty good trump card. (Did she not want to come along? Did they think it was too expensive to send her too, ignoring as usual the possibility of compromising their own geniuses with crushing despair?)

The next morning, at 0340, Mazer rouses Ender from a dream of being vivisected and brain-scanned by the formics and takes him to his first campaign mission. They chatter about who'll take what ships (Alai, Petra, and Vlad share a carrier's complement of fighters) and Ender assigns Bean one fighter from each carrier, which echoes back to his Ridiculous Ops squad, but seems like a terrible idea to me in this kind of scenario. If he sees something that requires a ship from someone else's group, can't he just relay the command? What do squadrons get out of having one of their fighters inexplicably not under their own control?

The formics have a spherical formation with an obvious core ship that Ender realises they want him to believe is the queen. Ender ignores it and orders them to try to compress the formation, not telling his friends about Dr Device as they protest the weirdness, and then they sit back to watch as Alai's first shot devours the fleet in a chain reaction. Mazer explains that, for a proper campaign, they had to have one fight in which the formics didn't know what the humans could do, and they'll learn rapidly from now on. He then proceeds to critique their technique, and gets increasingly harsh--a harshness that Ender passes on to his team.

"You're too kind to us," said Alai one day. "Why don't you get annoyed with us for not being brilliant every moment of every practice. If you keep coddling us like this we'll think you like us."

Some of the others laughed into their microphones. Ender recognized the irony, of course, and answered with a long silence. When he finally spoke, he ignored Alai's complaint. "Again," he said, "and this time without self-pity." They did it again, and did it right.

Their friendship withers, their trust in Ender as a commander grows, and somehow Ender knows that "it was to each other that they became close; it was with each other that they exchanged confidences", even though he never talks to them outside of game time or sees them in person at all. Obviously, this makes them all even more effective soldiers, because the Enderverse runs on the Omelas principle and making people sad and wounded always makes everything around them better. I bet whichever general thought they should supply Ender with his friends instead of all their assorted best students is feeling kind of stupid now.

Ender starts having more nightmares, dreaming of the Giant's corpse shaped into a formic village, and child-faced wolves that hunt him, not just the obvious threats like Peter and Bonzo, but Alai and Valentine and Dink, but in his dreams he still kills them all in the river, sobbing as he does so. He accuses Mazer of cheating at programming the game, and feels like his dreams are being watched. This section is just randomly trippy on its own, but it's foreshadowing a bunch of stuff, which is sort of cool. It'd work better for me if more of the stuff it was foreshadowing was in this book and not the sequels, but this is what happens when a standalone novel gets drafted into becoming backstory for an unrelated series.

It finally occurs to Ender that all this psychological stress might be affecting his brilliance, but the first big burnout is Petra, and the contrast between the way it's described here and the way it will be in Shadow is interesting. In Shadow she literally blacks out in the middle of a battle because eleven-year-old children are mortal; here she just makes a stupid maneuver, "and she discovered it in a moment when Ender wasn't with her" and gets shot up. When Ender does notice, he immediately tosses command of the surviving ships to Tom and has to salvage the battle because Petra's forces were the core of his strategy.

Ender knew at once that he had pushed her too hard--because of her brilliance he had called on her to play far more often and under much more demanding circumstances that all but a few of the others.

So, I'm mixed on this. Petra falters because she's been pushed too hard, and she's been pushed too hard because she's too awesome not to use, but "a few of the others" like Bustopher Kobayashi have been even pushed harder and they're apparently doing fine. Ender's pushing himself even harder and he still reacts as perfectly as he can, because Petra needs handholding through emergencies? Shen saves the day with a perfect Dr Device shot that eats a swarm of the enemy, and Fly Molo mops up.

She was not there for the next few practices, and when she did come back she was not as quick as she had been, not as daring. Much of what had made her a good commander was lost. Ender couldn't use her anymore, except in routine, closely supervised assignments. She was no fool. She knew what had happened. [....] The fact remained that she had broken, and she was far from being the weakest of his squad leaders.

I try not to link to TVtropes very often, but this is just such a flawless Faux Action Girl scenario. Petra, we're told, is totally hardcore and badass and brilliant. She also fails, utterly, and never recovers, and is the only girl we're aware of in the entire group. If you believe what the narrative tells you, then there's nothing wrong with this because Petra is so strong. If you consider the narrative unreliable for two seconds, Petra has been just barely not good enough for the entire book and of course the girl needs her hand held through everything. This comment thread also has some good previous discussion, if you missed it.

Ender's stress continues to mount; he chews his hand in his sleep until it has to be treated by a medic, and starts getting ideas like thinking that any prior candidate who washed out died--he doesn't say whether he thinks they get executed or if they just wasted away or what, but Mazer assures him this is ridiculous and he's perfectly safe.

"I think that Bonzo died. I dreamed about it last night. I remember the way he looked after I jammed his face with my head. [....] My whole life keeps playing out as if I were a recorder and someone else wanted to watch the most terrible parts of my life."

"We can't drug you if that's what you're hoping for. I'm sorry if you have bad dreams. Should we leave the light on at night?"

"Don't make fun of me!" Ender said. "I think I'm going crazy."

But Mazer remains unsympathetic and so Ender resolves not to tell him about this ever again, and continues to weaken. The battles get worse, longer, he has to rotate commanders in the same battle, then one day Ender blacks out in the middle of practice and is confined to bed for three days, then back to battles every day.

During the night he thought he felt hands touching him gently. Hands with affection in them, and gentleness. He dreamed he heard voices.

"You haven't been kind to him."

"That wasn't the assignment."

"How long can he go on? He's breaking down."

"Long enough. It's nearly finished." [....]

"I can't bear to see what this is doing to him." [...]

"I know. I love him too."

So here we have Mazer and Graff acting as audience surrogates to be ineffectually kind to Ender. Of course this kindness takes the form of unsolicited touching and invading his privacy at night, because that is how these jackwagons roll. Ender thinks he's dreaming it: "If there was love or pity for him, it was only in his dreams. He woke up and fought another battle and won. Then he went to bed and slept again and dreamed again and then he woke up and won again and slept again and he hardly noticed when waking became sleeping".

And then one day he wakes up and no one's there to shepherd him around, but he can't think of anything he could do other than eat breakfast and go to practice. There are other people in the simulator room, but he doesn't ask; Mazer explains that today is his final exam and these are the evaluators. Mazer adds that to switch things up, the test battle will occur around a planet, and Ender lists a few effects (gravity changing fuel costs):

"Does the Little Doctor work against a planet?"

Mazer's face went rigid. "Ender, the buggers never deliberately attacked a civilian population in either invasion. You decide whether it would be wise to adopt a strategy that would invite reprisals."

Humans are raised on vids of terror; one of the famous incidents of the First Invasion was the Scouring of China; suddenly they only ever struck purely military installations?! If they weren't slaughtering civilians, ever, why is the military so convinced this is a war of extermination? How does this not raise any questions in anyone's minds?

Ender runs through some warm-ups with his team and muses on what training will be left for him between today and the war.

And as he waited for the game to appear, he wished he could simply lose it, lose the battle badly and completely so that they would remove him from training, like Bonzo, and let him go home. [....] Failure meant he could go home.

Then the battle appears: ten thousand formic ships swarming around a planet, constantly shifting through random patterns, versus his own twenty old-model carriers with eighty fighters. Ender hears his team breathing heavily over their microphones (hot) and one of the evaluators swears behind him. They start to shift nervously as they realise how unevenly matched it is.

Ender once said that all Bonzo knew how to do was fail with style.

"Remember, the enemy's gate is down."

Bean says that, and they all laugh. Ender decides to remember that it's just a game and so to pursue a strategy that breaks Mazer's rules. He won his last game in the battleroom by ignoring the armies and going for the gate. ender decides that if he goes for the war crime, they'll consider him too dangerous to put in command, "and that is victory". He orders the ships into a 'thick cylinder', to better penetrate the enemy formation, and the enemy happily engulfs him. Supply your own subtext. Ender's ships fly in seemingly random patterns, then at a word they burst in all directions, firing madly, then at another a dozen fighters form up on the far side of the enemy fleet and dive for the planet. The formics cut off his escape, but he doesn't care anyway, because the only point is to get close enough to fire on the planet.

In three seconds, the planet is gone and the fleets as well, with only a few human ships surviving at the edge of the system.

Ender took off his headphones, filled with the cheers of his squadron leaders, and only then realized that there was just as much noise in the room with him. Men in uniform were hugging each other, laughing, shouting; others were weeping; some knelt or lay prostrate, and Ender knew they were caught up in prayer. Ender didn't understand. It seemed all wrong. They were supposed to be angry.

Graff and Mazer embrace him and thank him, tell him how proud they are. Ender remains confused until Mazer explains that the entire campaign up to this point wasn't testing, but the actual campaign, humans versus formics, and Ender has just won the war forever by destroying all their queens and committing xenocide. Ender walks out of the room, ignoring everyone, back to his room, strips down [drink!] and gets into bed. He wakes up to find Graff and Mazer in the room, informing him that Earth has heard what happened and every government in the world has given him their highest medal.

So here, in full, is the defence of this entire book.

Ender grabbed Mazer's uniform and hung onto it, pulling him down so they were face to face. "I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!" He was crying. He was out of control.

"Of course we tricked you into it. That's the whole point," said Graff. "It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it. It's the bind we were in. We had to have a commander with so much empathy that he would think like the buggers, understand them and anticipate them. So much compassion that he could win the love of his underlings and work with them like a perfect machine, as perfect as the buggers. But somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn't do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood the buggers well enough."

I don't know what to say to this that I haven't said before. Ender's big thing at Eros has been lack of compassion, has been his refusal to be any kinder to his subordinates than Mazer has been to him. If he had been given a raft of brilliant lieutenants who had never met him before, they'd have quite reasonably hated him even if he was a genius. He's running on the love that he supposedly earned from them back when he was in Battle School. Maybe that's why they shipped in Bean and Dink and Bustopher, so that Ender would have subordinates who would put up with his hardassedness. 'Compassion' as a superweapon would also have worked better if it were clear how it actually affected Ender's strategy--it's been a long time since he needed to, for example, identify a queen in an enemy fleet.

"And it had to be a child, Ender," said Mazer. "You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know."

Well, apparently any decent person except the ones who plan the campaign, deploy fighters, and pull the trigger to destroy a civilisation. Who planned this war? I mean, the ships have been in flight for seventy years and they successfully scheduled them all to arrive over the course of, what, two, three weeks? Just to maximise the possible burnout of their tacticians? The formic worlds are light-years apart and communications are instant, so there's no actual tactical value in hitting everywhere at once; they can't reinforce each other world-to-world. The battles could have been spread out over months to the same effect. Don't generals like Ender normally have some say in the way the war proceeds and not just individual firefights? What was the entire invasion fleet for, anyway? Wouldn't ansible-equipped drones have been about a jillion times more effective, what with being able to survive much greater physical stresses and save room/weight on life support? That way those could also have been piloted by genius children who think they're playing a video game. Has Earth ever had a competent Polemarch or Strategos or whoever planned this gong show? (Actually, it turns out Mazer plotted the campaign. Graff reprimands him for not leaving the minor outposts for later. Mazer tells him to screw off.)

Anyway, just as Peter and Valentine predicted, Earth has erupted into war. The Russian soldiers aboard Eros are leading an attack, and so Ender is locked down under guard. He dreams, has nightmares of the Giant's Drink again and of the End of the World, where he watches the formic homeworld burst and sees the Queen except it's his mom and her children are his friends and a dying formic is Bonzo accusing him of having no honor and his reflection is Peter. And at last he wakes up and Alai is there in his room, and there was much rejoicing.

"Some of the Russians who came in told us that when the Polemarch ordered them to find you and kill you, they almost killed him. [....] There's a million soldiers who'd follow you to the end of the universe."

Ender just wants to go home--good luck with that. The war ends, the lights come on, and Bean enters the room, followed by Bustopher, and Petra and Dink holding hands because of course she needs a man. They further explain the terms of the peace, stuff that won't be relevant until the second Shadow book. The banter is mostly pretty sweet and realistic. And maybe others don't read it the same way, but recalling what Dink taught Ender while naked in the battleroom ages ago:

"You OK?" Petra asked him, touching his head. "You scared us. They said you were crazy, and we said they were crazy."

"I'm crazy," said Ender. "But I think I'm OK."

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the message that mental illness is not shameful, not a mark or cause of evil, and not life-defining is the only consistent positive message in this entire book.

They joke about what they'll do next, and how they'll probably be forced to go to school until they're 17 because it's the law, and the chapter has the chutzpah to give us an Everybody Laughs Ending after slaughtering an entire species. But at least they were a species of monsters! And the people we like are alive! And if you talk to enough fans of Ender's Game, you'll find that some people stop here, because they aggressively miss the point. The graphic novel stops here. I'll be curious to see if the movie stops here. There's one more chapter to go, and it's not easy, but it's the only chance this book has at redemption. Next week: everything is terrible forever.

39 comments:

So here we have Mazer and Graff acting as audience surrogates to be ineffectually kind to Ender. Of course this kindness takes the form of unsolicited touching and invading his privacy at night, because that is how these jackwagons roll.Maybe it's not Graff and Mazer, maybe one of them is really Edward Cullen?Mazer's face went rigid. "Ender, the buggers never deliberately attacked a civilian population in either invasion. You decide whether it would be wise to adopt a strategy that would invite reprisals."This made more sense in the original story, where the background for the war and the nature of the enemy were kept vague.

Maybe we should just start sticking whatnapple stickers on copies of the book, because WHAT?????

If Mazer is telling the truth here: Mazer's face went rigid. "Ender, the buggers never deliberately attacked a civilian population in either invasion. You decide whether it would be wise to adopt a strategy that would invite reprisals." then basically nothing make sense any more. Not only is it a rewrite of the supposed horrors of the invasions and a removal of any reason for humans to believe the Formics mean to exterminate them, but it appears to cause real problems for the idea that Formics don't get individual life. I could see Formics considering queens - sentient life - off limits the way we consider civilians off limits, but I don't see how Formics would have the concept of sparing civilians. Not because they're evil but because civilians as such don't exist in their world as depicted. "Civilians" are all mindless in their world. There's no reason to have the concern for civilian life that humans do. Unless war is literally chess to them or something.

Mazer does hypothesise that formic wars were chess-style, with queens only captured, checkmated, never killed, which is why his kill-the-queen tactics won the Second Invasion. But more to the point, yes, there is zero reason that the formics wouldn't have targeted human 'civilians' in the same way that humans might target an enemy's means of production--destroy the opponent's tools and you can win without killing them. So there are multiple levels on which it makes no sense in context; it just serves to ensure that Ender will kill the planet and some people will consider this horrendous rather than obviously the entire point of Dr Device.

The sudden appearance of everyone he trusted at Battle School strikes me as very Brazil-like -- rather, it seems likely that Ender is broken, badly, by Mazer&Graff, and he either hallucinates or dreams everything from when Petra, Bean, Alai, et al show up.

He meant that they didn't attack any population centres they thought were actual people. The Formics thought that there were only a few sentience in an entire population, they thought they were just disabling industrial machinery rather than killing hundreds of millions of noncombatants. It's still a bit odd for Mazer to say that, but at least the sentiment is more consistent.

The thought occurs that there's a second advantage (from Graff's point of view) to the deceit: they get a general who LITERALLY sees his troops only as numbers on a screen and won't hesitate an instant to sacrifice them when necessary.

If Mazer was talking about his theories on the Formics which were mentioned earlier in the chapter, why didn't he reference that conversation?Seen in a vacuum, this boilerplate "I strongly disapprove of this course of action but won't come out and say so" seems like reverse psychology. The whole "authority figure says "don't do this" so that protagonist will immediately go do that" thing. Only that makes no sense whatsoever in context.

One thing that always got me about the end of the Formic war: why did the Formics have all of their queens on one world? We know that they (a) sent a queen in the Invasion Fleet (so they were cool with not having all of their queens one one world), and that (b) they had [at least] several other planets.

Sometime after the Second Invasion, they must have said: "Hey, it would be a really good idea to move all of our queens to our home world. I'm sure that the human admiral in charge of wiping us out will do us a solid and restore this queen we're leaving in hibernation. On a world that this admiral might one day visit."

The only way this makes sense is that they didn't want a prolonged war-- they wanted to lose quickly (by planetary annihilation). Except: why then did they fight back when the Third Invasion struck? Does anybody have any ideas about this?

Mazer at one point snaps at Ender that in a real war he won't have infinite digital ships and so needs to cut back on his unnecessary losses; Ender counters (and thus passes Mazer's test) by saying that if he's too afraid of losing a ship he'll never commit to anything. It's not until Ender's Shadow that Bean realises Mazer knows the people out there who are dying in battle, and might reasonably be upset seeing Ender send them to their deaths. There are a lot of reasons Bean is my favourite.

The best guess I have, based on the finale next week, is that they wanted to 'atone' by making the war all-or-nothing. If the humans chose to spare them, they would all live; if not, they would all accept their deaths together. I can be mildly flexible on this because alien logic wouldn't necessarily make sense to humans, but it is definitely really weird.

It does if Mazer was intentionally trying to push Ender towards xenocide, which everyone's reactions would certainly suggest. Maybe even in a simulation the only way they saw him going for the total-planet-kill solution was to flip off his teacher.

About half of Mazer's short speech is there to make sure that we really understand that Earth's counterstrike against the Formics is unnecessary. (This realization is not intended to turn us off: we're supposed to be bathed in a warm glow at the thought of the sheer badassery of [adult, male] humans. 'Welcome to Earth, m-f-ers, meep meep.') And the other half is there to tell us why. The Formics never deliberately attacked a civilian population because they were incapable of doing any such thing. They were incapable of doing any such thing because it would have been an action which made no sense in terms of their view of the universe. The Formics couldn't fathom attacking a civilian population because they could have no idea, given their own history as a species, that any such thing as a civilian population existed. All 'civilians' in Formic terms would have just been superficially differentiated limbs under the control of one or another of the queens. Ironically, what the Formics have is that Heinleinian wet dream — a completely militarized society. (Whether or not that's a wet dream which also holds an attraction for Card is a question which has to be left up to the individual reader to answer — YMMV.) And they have it because, not in spite of, the fact that they are a hive mind, or a collocation of hive minds, led by queens. (And they look as though they're making a success of it, which is not something we can allow.)

The envoi ("you decide") is just more of the Responsibility Ball that Ender and his mentor-captors keep playing all the way through this book. In Ender's Game responsibility is a hot-potato which is passed from adult to adult and on down to Ender, who keeps ineffectually trying to pass it back up the line again. When Mazer starts in with the "it's-up-to-you" talk we know that at some future date Mazer is going to be interrogated and interrogated pretty earnestly, and the main question aimed at him is going to be "Did you ever give such-and-such an order?" (This book was written before the date when universal surveillance, a state of things under which everybody's every word and action would be recorded, began to look like a serious possibility.) So, Mazer has to be able to answer, in all good faith, "no I did not" — Mazer may have made a very strong suggestion, but that's not the same as giving an order. The whole of Ender's Game is a short course on the art of avoiding accountability. Ender is a highly gifted patsy, who isn't old enough or wise enough to know how to avoid accountability; that's why he gets stuck with the hot potato, and "loses".

(Interestingly, although Mazer Rackham mentions reprisals, he doesn't specify what kind of reprisals he's talking about, nor does he mention their source. All the blanks are left to be filled in by Ender, whose access to information has been rigidly controlled by his handlers for half of his life. Ender understands as much as the state of his knowledge permits him to understand; in other words, he understands just enough to enable him to win somebody else's fight.)

I assumed it was more that the queens had been evacuated from all other areas when tit became clear that the humans were coming to wipe out the outposts. Still a lot of logical holes for why they weren't more cautious, didn't do more to ensure their species' survival, but at least it makes some sense.

On the other hand, they can *communicate* world to world. The IF wants a genocide, after all. They need to strike everywhere at once in order to ensure the entire species is destroyed, otherwise the border colonies may send off evacuation ships or whatnot.

"He meant that they didn't attack any population centres they thought were actual people. The Formics thought that there were only a few sentience in an entire population, they thought they were just disabling industrial machinery rather than killing hundreds of millions of noncombatants. It's still a bit odd for Mazer to say that, but at least the sentiment is more consistent."

Alternatively, the Formics didn't attack the population centers they noted, because they didn't know where the 'queens' they imagined to be present might be and didn't want to kill them, but just intended to pummel the human's military into submission, and only targeted things that looked threatening.

Alternatively alternatively, Mazer only said it because he realized Ender would hope to shirk his responsibilities by committing a simulated atrocity, thus goading him into thinking of attacking the planet without actually needing to say 'you realize MD Device is basically designed to be a planet killer'.

Wouldn't ansible-equipped drones have been about a jillion times more effective, what with being able to survive much greater physical stresses and save room/weight on life support? That way those could also have been piloted by genius children who think they're playing a video game. Has Earth ever had a competent Polemarch or Strategos or whoever planned this gong show?

My theory? Recall the International Fleet *knows* something like the truth, and *wants* to destroy the Formics for their own reasons. No one really knew what was going to happen next, and if the Formics didn't show up again... well, the problem with drones is that they're expendable. The third invasion was a suicide mission all along, but with human crews, it's easier to create a sense that it has to succeed, and avoid the risk of the mission being scrapped. If it was a drone fleet, humanity might well just decide 'eh, fuck it, just... throw the drones somewhere over there and forget the whole thing'. With manned ships, not only do you not have that chance, but with a fanatic crew dedicated to the destruction of the Formic race at all costs, it's fail-deadly. Even if the IF later decides *not* to go ahead, the Fleet can very well still attack on their own. Without their leader (I'm guessing 'intelligence' was not one of the characteristics selected for on the crews...), it might not work as well, but it still has a chance. They'll refuse orders to, say, back off and try linking their ansibles with the Formic hive mind. It'll even work if, say, Earth is destroyed for some reason.

Also, do the Formics have Dr Device or not? Because if they do, Ender's 'form the fleet into a cylinder and launch it at the planet' seems like the worst plan ever.

Also, they made a huge deal about bringing Ender to Eros, but nine months later they ship in thirty-six more kids like it's no big thing?

Presumably they brought in Ender to begin training/intensive indoctrination ahead of time, then the rest came on the regular supply flight mentioned earlier.

I'm pretty sure there's only one world? Otherwise the whole 'commit xenocide by blowing up their

It's kind of vague. They definitely settled other worlds (as we'll see next chapter) but they've never been included in the campaign. Option 1 is that, once Ender logs off the game, each ship has orders to bust the planet and they're just pretending this wasn't the plan all along. Option 2 is that the formics always keep their queen on a ship (theoretically safer than being on a planet) and so whenever Ender beats the fleet in space, any drones on the planet shut down immediately. Somewhere I didn't quote, I believe they say that they've gotten word all of the remaining formic ships not at the homeworld have shut down, so the homeworld is significant because it's where all of the surviving queens were.

Option 2 seems plausible because the formics knew the invasion was coming and so might well have decided to put their outpost queens in space but when it came to their homeworld they were too stubborn or too despairing to run any further.

Alternatively alternatively, Mazer only said it because he realized Ender would hope to shirk his responsibilities by committing a simulated atrocity

That's my guess at this point.

Also, do the Formics have Dr Device or not?

They do not; I think Mazer points out that if the Third Invasion fails, they'll probably have worked out how to make it before they come at us again. Another push in the direction of 'if this is your first night at xenocide club, you have to xenocide'.

"Ender counters (and thus passes Mazer's test) by saying that if he's too afraid of losing a ship he'll never commit to anything."

In the context of this book, that's a remark which wins Ender badass points. ("What, you expect me to care about the fighters? Why man, they're mere employees.") Which is the reason Ender passes the test.

"There are a lot of reasons Bean is my favorite."

I'm certain that one of the reasons Bean's story was committed to print was that at some juncture the author of these books noticed that too many of his readers were not sufficiently beguiled by SuperTyke the First and decided to have a second go. (Strictly IMO.)

I can't decide if I want to do Speaker or Shadow next. On the one hand, Shadow has so much more going for it, but on the other, Speaker flows directly out of the ending here. Either way, I think Bean got upgraded to godmode, not because Card felt too many people were insufficiently charmed by Ender, but because he couldn't resist making everyone he graces with his keyboard SO SMART. Thus the Wiggin parents get bumped from 'obvious bumbling mundanes' to 'secret supergeniuses', for example. I haven't read any of Card's other works, and don't particularly care to, but the genius levels from Game through to the end of the Shadows feel rather like watching a montage of Dragon Ball Z training/testing sequences. "Well, I've worked my way to doing push-ups in 100 times normal Earth gravity, now I'll run this road in two hours instead of the year it would normally take!"

So Ender joins the Goddamned Villain Club, although I can't be sure how willingly he signs on, because Mazer and Graff are able to trick young children into fighting a genocidal war. I wonder whether anything resembling the Nuremberg Principles exist in this future world, because I would hate to be the magistrate that had to officiate the war crimes tribunal for all of the child soldiers here. Of course, this assumes that there is a civilian government somewhere that would be willing to prosecute them.

Graff and Mazer, on the other hand, should be sitting those tribunals for many, many violations of the rules of war, right from the beginning of Battle School.

Also, the MD Device on those old ships was supposed to be short-range, necessitating the planet-busting, yes? Assuming that FTL has improved in the interim, again, why not send drones or faster-FTL ships to overtake the old ones and fire updated MDs? Or, if coordination is so damn good, why not send all the ships that survived earlier combat as reinforcement on the homeworld attack?

It makes no sense. Also, why Petra? Surely the lesser commanders would drop before Our Heroes...

I think Ender can safely be exonerated of xenocide, since there was an entire shadowy conspiracy keeping him from knowing the truth, but he's still got to have something incoming for the deaths of Bonzo and Stilson. (Stilson was obviously murder; Bonzo might be some lesser charge since the fatal blow was dealt while Ender legitimately feared for his life.)

why not send all the ships that survived earlier combat as reinforcement on the homeworld attack?

While humanity's stardrives have improved, the distances between worlds would seem to be enough that none of he other fleets could make the trek to the formic homeworld in less than many years--based on the math BaseDeltaZero did back in chapter 13(2), they're already travelling at over 99% the speed of light, so there isn't much margin for acceleration until they learn to teleport.

Bustopher is hardcore, and his sister Billingsley Kobayashi wasn't brought to Command School because she was deemed a security risk for talking about how philotic translators could solve all communication problems forever.

At this point, I'm thinking humanity provoked the first war because "ew, bugs." I mean, why would the Formics, if they only kind of play at war with one another, have ever attacked an enemy they knew so little about. And wasn't it framed as completely out of the blue? I think the supervillains in charge were lying then, just like they've lied about nearly everything in the book.

Card is in the middle of writing a trilogy (obviously) about the First Invasion, because he discovered there was some money he didn't own yet, or something. I have only flipped through them a little, but I guess anyone who wanted to wade into that mess could inform us exactly how things went down, retrocanonically.

Which... it's a risky strategy on their part, because an equally valid way to flip off the teacher would be to refuse to play-- just intentionally suicide your troops and not deploy the Dr. Device at all. Since Ender thinks it's all a simulation, it's not like he'd worry about actual people being killed by doing that. Maybe that's why they had to be so certain that their commander was someone who would always, always go for overkill?

The weirdest thing is that Ender, who was supposedly chosen for his ability to have insight into others, never exhibits the slightest hint of this ability; while Peter, who was rejected for supposedly lacking this ability, has enough of it to take over the world based on that alone.

I think it sort of makes sense if you assume the formic queens are always scraping with each other. Like, if you fight a lot and don't treat it as serious because your opponents are mindless, you wouldn't think much about taking out any ships that come near. You'd possibly treat it just as a warning not to encroach. "Hey stay away or we might go for your queen."

Like so many things that would make sense, Card makes it clear that this is canonically not the case. The formics' ancient history involved a lot of war between hives, but their great social revolution came about from the decision to form alliances--a mother and daughter lived in peace and so their hive was stronger than any other, and bit by bit everyone came to realise that they prospered more in peace than war. I'm not even sure the formic ships in the First Invasion had proper 'weapons'; what little I read of that prequel suggested that they obliterated human ships with some kind of engine-venting technique.

Much of what had made her a good commander was lost. Ender couldn't use her anymore, except in routine, closely supervised assignments.

Gods, I forgot JUST HOW BAD the Petra scene is. I knew it was bad, because I remembered WHITE HOT FURY, but I forgot how bad.

It's not just that she messes up. It's not just that she breaks. It's that she breaks permanently. And it's written in the most dehumanizing language ("Ender couldn't use her") and written like she accepted her uselessness meekly.

In my increasingly-distant recollection, Petra actually comes across pretty well in Shadow of the Hegemon. (Ender's Shadow, as I've noted, already makes efforts to retcon some of her failures in EG so she's smarter and stronger, which might be part of why I like it.) She has huge guilt over her breakdown in the campaign, but since other people know about said guilt, she uses it as one more way she can manipulate her enemies. This isn't to say it's a great storyline--she spends the whole of Hegemon as a hostage taken by one man to get leverage over another man--and there's a lot of 'I can get people to underestimate me because I'm a girl' and such, which has been played out a jillion times before. But, with the exception of Bean, she does get to be smarter than everyone else and the best strategist and tactician and constantly be manipulating the villain from close proximity.

It's not until Shadow Puppets that things really go to hell because she gets struck with the Curse of the Author Tract and her whole life begins to revolve around convincing Bean to make babies with her because of course it does. It's pretty much garbage from that point on, but so is everyone else. I've blotted 90% of Shadow of the Giant from my mind.

and there's a lot of 'I can get people to underestimate me because I'm a girl' and such, which has been played out a jillion times before.

One of many reasons why I was underwhelmed with The Avengers, as I recall.

I. You. Convincing Bean to... and then she switches to Peter, and...

*brain breaks*

Relatedly, I hate it when authors refuse to make new characters and the world shrinks to about 20 people. It's so weirdly incestuous. "Oh, Ross won't marry me? Well, I'll just shack up with Chandler or Joey! It's not like there are BILLIONS OF MEN OUT THERE."

I just remembered you weren't a watcher of Friends, so please insert other random character names in the above. Ack.